It’s impossible to enjoy failure. I’ve known it in many forms, from the trivial to the life-altering. For a very long span in my life, I let perfectionist tendencies rule my responses to failure.
This post is one in a thread stretching from Dec. 3rd forward to the 24th.
If the post seems to lack context, I’d encourage you for continuity’s
sake to go back and read earlier ones in order of publication.
I was prone to rationalizing away the importance of the goal that I had not attained. I was even more prone to judging, sometimes harshly, others who did not reach the marks I set for them. Of course, at other times, I judged myself and rationalized for others. Regardless of the permutations of blame or, “Oh well, it doesn’t matter anyway,” as reactions, the next challenge-after-failure inevitably lay ahead, and fear iced the path between me and the next outcome. With that mindset towards the crisis, sometimes it was even difficult to enjoy success, but failure was always repulsive.
As someone with a solid education in Greek and Latin, I should have known better. The classically proper term for the decisive moments in a meaningful contest is crisis. Have a look at this description of the original sense and application of crisis in Latin and, before Latin, in Greek. As a medical descriptor, it denotes the peak of illness where recovery or death are equally possible, but the scale tips one way or the other because of the patient’s bodily reserves, helpful medical interventions, or the absence of one or the other of those. Sometimes the tipping is inexplicable to the physician. Too often, though, we mistake the moments and circumstances of ordinary challenges we face as being life-or-death struggles. In most of these, it is a given that success and failure hang in the balance, but we become our own undoing when we let the outcome of a crisis (an exam or other school task, a business meeting, a race result, etc.) mean life or death for our self-esteem, our esteem for others, or our willingness to see our way through and past lesser failures to greater successes.
Even if one has awareness of the original sense of crisis as used by Hippocrates and Galen, it takes an act of will to adopt and maintain an objective perspective on one’s own performance in a crisis. As a part of ancient medical terminology, crisis is something that the physician objectively observes and the patient subjectively undergoes. Under these circumstances, the physician is unlikely to assign the outcome of an infection-induced fever spike or a period of unconsciousness after extreme blood loss to a patient’s determination, skill, or preparation. In the modern, non-medical application of crisis, on the other hand, each of us is, metaphorically, both the physician and the patient. When the outcome of a non-medical crisis is a failure to meet the intended mark, the ‘physicians’ in many of us judge the outcome as owing to moral or mental lapses. “I’m not smart enough!” “I should not have been rattled by the boss!” “If only I had trained harder!”. The knock-on effect of this is that the morale of both ‘physician’ and ‘patient’ suffers, making future crises less likely to end in success.
In my academic life, both as a student in grad school and as a Latin teacher, I did not consistently maintain a valid objective view of myself (or others) during or after crises. This is true of other roles I played in life, as well. I not only did not enjoy failures, I had great difficulty turning moments of failure into periods of growth. The ‘blame or rationalize’ approach regularly precluded the idea of growth, and rarely allowed me to identify alternative (better) ways to approach a crisis similar to one in which I had already failed. Don’t get me wrong, I was not a bad teacher (whatever that means): I had a meaningful career in the classroom in in my school’s leadership, during which I enjoyed many successes, and enabled (or influenced) many more successes for my students.
It was in the last third of my career that I began to build a different mindset towards failure. As a teacher, I applied it primarily in my work to build spoken Latin skills and bring living Latin pedagogy into my classroom. But it was elsewhere, in the mountains and (later) on my adventure motorcycle, that I had a powerful re-orientation towards both failure and success. It is no accident that this re-orientation was the consequence of trying things where I had no track-record of success and where, frankly, I experienced failure after failure.
Two paradigms shifted for me: 1) I did these activities only for my own pleasure in doing them, not for praise or advancement or because I was already skilled at them (I wasn’t, and still amn’t); 2) both hiking and motorcycling had the potential for adventure (by which here I mean coming to a new experience and understanding of the world), but to get to where the adventures lie, I needed to accept failure as sometimes bad luck and sometimes as a cue for growth. In either case, I could turn the phailure into my own prompt to go back and do what I enjoyed again. A phailure due to bad weather or a mechanical breakdown meant that I would get to return and try for that destination again. A phailure due to my lack of stamina, poor planning, or skill deficit meant that I had work to do before I returned. I could train my body to hike greater distances with greater elevation gain. I could build a new itinerary that incorporated what I learned was lacking on my first attempt. I could learn and practice the riding skills that will keep me from going down when riding rock-filled ruts (those are still, literally, my downfall!).
I still don’t enjoy phailures as I experience them, but I love what I experience before one, and after one, I improve my chances for success the next time I face a crisis. Keeping an objective focus on the before and after adds some allure to my phailures. My next few posts will be case-studies of growth towards desired success in hiking and motorcycling, which I hope will offer entertainment, at least!
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5 responses to “The Allure of Phailure”
Here again I admire your introspection and willingness to take us with you on your internal journeys as well as your external ones. Your evolving perspective on how to integrate failures in a positive fashion into your perspective of your self, to see pitfalls as guides to improvement and achievement, sounds hard-won and is definitely precious.
You write of both “failures” and “phailures.” Besides the play on your initials, what is the difference between the two terms? I feel as if each spelling indicates a slightly different valence.
You also write how
“Even if one has awareness of the original sense of crisis as used by Hippocrates and Galen, it takes an act of will to adopt and maintain an objective perspective on one’s own performance in a crisis”
and
“I did not consistently maintain a valid objective view of myself (or others) during or after crises.”
While you do glance at the possible importance of medical interventions and the assistance of doctors, I think you give short shrift to the role others play in our ability to contend with failures and successes. Even when you pick up again on the medical paradigm, your post conflates and internalizes the positions of the healer and the patient. Like Bottom (“Let me play the lion too!”), there is a desire to act all the parts:
“When the outcome of a non-medical crisis is a failure to meet the intended mark, the ‘physicians’ in many of us judge the outcome as owing to moral or mental lapses.”
There *are* people who are born with an indomitable spirit, who apparently cannot be broken no matter what hardships, tragedies, or failures they endure. These people are admirable, somewhat annoying,* and rare. Most us of us learn to handle failure through the support and kindness of others. As a teacher and a parent, you will have seen how students (and colleagues too) flourish when a teacher (or administrator) takes an interest in their successes and coaches them through failures, how belief in and accommodation for their disabilities and gifts provides a platform on which they can build themselves up, how disinterest or disregard can make a promising student deflate.
Our ability to deploy our will power can grow out of the image of ourselves we get mirrored back to us. Our inner physicians are not objective; they are much less likely to prescribe remedies if they are led to believe the patient is not recoverable and more likely to expend every effort to find a cure when they have been told the patient might live. You know what a difference your support, encouragement, and attention have made in the lives of your students and their parents, too.
None of what I have written diminishes your personal realization of how to transmogrify your attitude toward your less-affirming experiences. Your persistence is laudable and I think the stories of how you continue to scale new heights and navigate new roads is remarkable and inspiring.
_____________________________
*Annoying mostly because they are often held up as exemplars for the rest of us. It’s a bit like expecting everyone to be Einstein.
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I used the two spellings of the f-/ph- word to communicate my shifting perspective on the opposite of success. The f-word spelling connotes the repulsiveness that I saw in not meeting a particular goal. The ph-word spelling is a cheesy way of saying that I own the value of the effort which included not meeting the goal: I value the experiences of the hike leading up to the point where I had to quit, I value what I learned I need to do in order to come back and meet the goal another time, and I value the prospect of enjoying that future hike and the success that may come on it. As a writer, I perhaps clumsily wanted to say that I accept the phailure as mine, my shortcoming as well as my potential for going the distance.
Your observations in the second part of your comment merits thought before I respond.
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I don’t really believe in the premise of “an indomitable spirit.”
Ican only speak for myself in response to the second part of your comment. Internally, the conflation of the physician and patient ‘roles’ is how I roll in managing challenges and growth. I’m not adept at incorporating other people’s words of encouragement or coaching into that dynamic in the moment. They matter, but my incorporation is slow, conducted only after my own reflection and finding that the skill or habit being coached is worthy and capable of emulation and adaptation for me. Ultimately, whether I am lifting weights at the gym or dealing with a persistently sticky set of conflicts in my new role as a farm manager, I ultimately have to act (and direct!) all the parts that I play. Sure I benefit from my coach’s instruction or the books I’ve read about resolving conflicts, but Carlos can’t improve how I execute my ‘high pull’ and the authoring psychologists can’t help me hold a tone that doesn’t provoke unhelpful emotions among the parties to the conflict.
You are right that our inner physicians are not objective. But your extension of the life and death metaphor which I used reaches an extreme that I did not intend. In that extreme, where a ‘crisis’ (as I applied it to non-medical challenges) is viewed as life-or-death (rather than as part of a continuum of opportunities to do move closer to some bigger victory) the physician becomes a Dr. Hyde, wreaking destruction upon the patient’s wellbeing. My Dr. Hyde was raging in my managment of my efforts to complete my Ph.D. and, later, to get my administrator’s license, amongst other failures that I’d prefer to, well, hide. But there they are. The physician-patient duality in such cases is unhelpful in metaphor and in practice. I don’t have a substitute model: the best I can do is to say that I have learned to view my life as something that I can enjoy: in it, a ‘crisis’ will come whether I am ready for it or not. If I get through it, that is a success. If I’ve improved a bit in how I respond in the ‘crisis,’ it’s a bigger success. If others get through it with me, I may begin to feel good about having had the ‘crisis.’ If neither of the last two conditions are fulfilled, I only harm myself and others if I give in to failure and view it as inevitable. Then Dr. Hyde is back in charge.
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I see! I’m sorry that I didn’t pick up on the nuance, but I knew it had to have some subtle significance. Thank you for explaining.
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No need for a “sorry.” As I have often heard, a joke isn’t funny if it requires an explanation. Mutatis mutandis, the principal works with my navel-gazing pop psychology.
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